To The People I Admire in the Hep C Community

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to get to know some amazing people. In the context of hep C, they have been mostly people from the community of lived experience (but not exclusively). I have met some brilliant people and some people who were so kind to everyone they met. The people who were facing the toughest odds in their quest for better health, who were tenacious and determined to get the care they deserved in the face of tremendous barriers, were standouts to me.

To those fighting for treatment

The people I admire most are people like you, yes you. I admire you for taking the necessary steps to be free of hep C. You are informing yourself and taking a stand against the beast, as we used to call it, or dragon. A once formidable foe indeed, but you can, or you have already defeated it, because you have the level of conviction and determination needed.

To those fighting for knowledge

You are one of the people who are trying to learn and engage with others in an effort to understand what you need to know or do to be hep C free. In a world where there is a constant bombardment of information, it is sometimes hard to know what fits for you, and it is the same story again: we are all different. What fits for someone else may not fit at all for you. You can find the information that makes sense for you, and the effort you are making to do that is admirable.

It has been an amazing ride for me in this hep C journey, and it has been wonderful meeting some of the stars of the science side of hep C, and to attend several conferences has been pretty cool, but none of that compares with the time I have been blessed to spend with community. Listening to the issues that you care about, learning from you what matters most to you, has been the best part, hands down.

This fight is about YOU

Is this useful in any way for you? Not readily apparent, but it just felt like something I needed to say to you, the reason for any of this. It is all about you, the people affected. It is not about the experts or the drug company or anything else. Sure, they all have a place in our journey, but the whole thing is about you. Not me, not the doctor, not anybody or anything but you.

You are the people I admire. You may never win any awards, and honestly, I never will either, but who needs them. The award or reward is again about you, and your victories and triumphs over hep C. You can do the things you need to do because you are the person who wants to overcome the barriers placed in your path. The stigma, the access to care, the treatment, and all the things that you need to do or have done already, are all surmountable!

You are the person and people I admire most.